Amazon is opening four new mini-data centers in India

AWS is set to open four new mini data centers in India over the next two years, one each in Bengaluru, Chennai, Delhi and Kolkata. These are part of AWS’ broader plan to open 32 such Local Zones in 26 countries over the next two years.

These Local Zones, which are built in highly populous areas, will provide cloud services for its customers who need near-zero latency for their applications, some use cases of which are for video streaming, gaming, and applications that require real-time feedback.  

AWS describes the Local Zones as a type of an infrastructure that will support AWS regions to place compute, storage, databases and other AWS services at the edge of the cloud, near populated locations and industry, IT centres.

“The edge of the cloud is expanding and is now becoming available virtually everywhere,” said Prasad Kalyanaraman, Vice President of Infrastructure Services at AWS.   

“We are expanding to more locations for our customers around the world who have asked for these same capabilities to push the edge of cloud services to new places,” added Kalyanaraman. 

 Also read: Why enterprises want 5G’s low latency internet 

Most data centres usually spring up in large parks away from the city, mostly due to less electricity costs, lower real estate prices and high tax incentives. However, having them far away can also cause the companies using these data centres to compromise a bit on latency.   

Latency refers to the time take for data to travel from the server to an end-point such as a smartphone, PC, IoT device and the likes. Low latency is what most companies pursue today, one such way to accomplish this would be to bring data centers closer to the city.    

 AWS currently has 16 Local zones, which are all present in US cities and used for edge computing capabilities for companies such as Netflix and gaming platform Ubitus to name a few.  

With growing digitization in India, these mini data-centers could become more crucial for more case studies such as payments, gaming, or even for needs of upcoming trends such as the metaverse.  

AWS said that customers for the local zones will get the usual benefits such as the pay-as-you go model, access to application programing interfaces and other AWS tools.